Our ride on the “green” teeter totter.

Cutting the Cable Cord

I’ve mentioned before that my husband and I are moving and we are moving ourselves. This is not a fun prospect and the reason for my utter lack of posting lately. The sewing machine and my entire stash has already been boxed up although we won’t move until the 10th of October. Since we are moving ourselves and we both work so much I’ve been slowly packing up our house. It gives me a sense of accomplishment and prevents me from thinking about the fact that we still have to load all this stuff up and then unpack it again…

Besides a new job (which is the driving reason for moving) we are also trying to cut down on our expenses and moving allows us to shave a couple hundred dollars a month off of our rent. We have also decided after much discussion to cancel our cable service. If you know us you will be shocked and probably doubtful that we will see this through. Don’t worry we haven’t been abducted and brain washed. In preparation for cutting the cord we’ve purchased a box to stream Netflix movies instantly to our TV ($180.00), an antenna to catch the HD signals from the local and free stations ($34.00) and a small converter box to use that antenna on our Mac ( $129.00). So far this isn’t saving us much money… the total cost is $343.00. Since cable costs us roughly $80 a month it’s going to take us over four months to break even and five to start seeing a real savings. To offset this we’ve decided to sell our small flat screen TV for $100 (we will be using our Mac in it’s place) and our DVD player for $20 (this is being replaced with the streaming Blue Ray player). If we succeed in selling them for our asking price cutting the cable will only cost us $223…. Looking at it this way is depressing so instead I prefer to think about the fact that in a year we will have saved $737.

Share this:

Like this:

Related

We cancelled our cable years ago and would never go back. We have a mac mini hooked up to our TV that we use for Netflix streaming and we also get DVD’s from the library. We too have an antenna for local channels. We really don’t miss it at all. For the first couple months it was hard to break that habit of watching tv when you didn’t have anything else to do, but now we read or do something productive. We feel like we have tons more time and we get a lot more done!

Good luck moving, I feel for you. Packing up & moving is tough going. I hate not being able to have everything available!

Tim and I cut the cable several months ago and do not miss it at all. We did invest in a good antenna to pick up over 10 channels and we also paid the one time fee at Snapstream.com to be able to record all programs and view at our liesure. Snapstream was well worth the 99.00 one time fee which you download into your puter that we have connected to our new lcd tv which we also use as a monitor. We also were paying roughly 80.00 dollars a month to channel surf. I have found that ABC actually has many shows I enjoy. We now get with our antenna 2 ABC, 2 NBC, CBS, CW, FOX, ABC 24 Hour Weather station and a few PBS stations.
Good Luck and Check out Snapstream.com